The Windsor Knot Read Online Free PDF Page A

Even after years of familiarity had rendered the castle commonplace, Geoffrey could not look at it without a feeling of disquiet. To him the castle did not conjure up thoughts of Disneyland and Bavarian calendars, but memories of madness and family sorrow. He wished it had been built of spunsugar rather than Georgia granite so that it would melt away in the spring rains. Just as well that Elizabeth was not lumbering her wedding with the emotional baggage of Cousin Alban’s castle, he thought. He wondered what she did have in mind.
       Charles Chandler stalked off down the hall, trying to mutter the quote about a prophet being without honor in his own country, but he kept getting tangled up over the wording. Literary matters were not within his realm of expertise. The
sentiments
were right, though, he thought with a stab of self-pity. Not only was he without honor in his own family—much of the time he was without ordinary politeness as well. Charles, the earnest and ascetic scientist, felt so out of place in his hearty country family that he took refuge in fantasizing himself as a changeling. He often wondered if Carl Sagan had a son his age who liked touch football and tailgate picnics; and if so, could they arrange to have blood tests?
    He wished that it had not been necessary for him to come home again, but his other place of residence, the scientific commune to which he had belonged since college, had been struck by what Charles liked to call Sunnyvale Syndrome, leading to its disbanding and to the relinquishing of the group’s long-term lease on the property. The symptoms of Sunnyvale Syndrome included a sudden aversion to orange crates used as furniture and an uncontrollable urge to possess a BMW. In short, Charles’s scientific cronies had sold out. One by one, as they passed into their third decade of life, the commune members began to seek out jobs in the computer industry; some of them even applied for teaching positions on the same college campuses they had fled not so long before.
    “Face it, Charles,” said one deserting yuppie, “even if you are the next Einstein, as long as you stay unaffiliated with a university or corporation, you’re never going to get a grant to fund your work, and anyway, the Nobel prizes are rigged politically, so you’d never get one. No bucks, no glory. I mean, what’s the point, man?”
    Others had warned him about the so-called biological clock of physicists, which was just as ominous in its way as the baby deadline was to women. Charles was past thirty. Virtually all of the great discoveries in the theoretical sciences are made by young minds, his colleagues reminded him. Einstein proposed his special theory of relativity at the age of twenty-six. His fellow physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg had won their Nobel prizes by the time they were twenty-eight. Didn’t Charles think that it was time to face the obvious; shouldn’t he start considering tenure and tax shelters? Stung by their lack of faith in his ability, Charles had retorted that Isaac Newton had been a late bloomer, and that he would show them who was over the hill, but they had given him pitying, disbelieving smiles, and told him to keep the orange crates.
    Then he tried to persuade them to spend a few more months testing cold fusion theories. According to reports in the journals, those experiments could be conducted in an ordinary kitchen without expensive equipment; anyone who succeeded in producing cold fusion would become immeasurably rich. Surely it was worth a try? They thought not. With ill-concealed grins they had pleaded prior commitments, so in the end, Charles packed his duffel bag and two orange crates and went home to Chandler Grove. Now he was trying to decide what to do, in case he didn’t manage to discover the process of cold fusion. He had nightmares in whichEinstein and Alfred Nobel sang “Happy Birthday” to him over a blazing cake with dynamite sticks for candles. He would